'MySpace is not dead," says an emphatic Jason Hirsch- horn, smiling and leaning back in his chair at News Corporation's digital headquarters in Beverly Hills, California. Given the battering that the site has taken over the past couple of years – especially during its rival Facebook's rapid ascent – his optimism may seem surprising. But then again, as the New Yorker is one of two men charged with breathing life back into the world's second most popular social network, it isn't unexpected.

We're sitting in the unassuming office that Hirschhorn – a former head of MTV's digital operations – shares with his quieter counterpart, Mike Jones. Everything about their set-up, as MySpace's newly elected co-presidents, screams partnership. They sit at their desks face-to-face, divide up their duties, use similar language. And together they have spent months plotting how to reverse the site's fortunes and make it relevant again.

"We have a huge audience, which is fantastic – there are over 100 million users on MySpace," says Jones, a serial entrepreneur and a former vice president at AOL, who became the company's chief operating officer last spring. "But it's at a precipice where it needs to jump to the next level of evolution."

Lost business

Put lightly, that is an understatement. It has been a tumultuous couple of years for the website that took the world by surprise when Rupert Murdoch bought its parent company for $580m [then £332m] in 2005. Once an online hotspot attracting musicians and movie stars, the site almost capsized in Facebook's wake and, as a result, it has drifted off the radar for millions of people.

While the site is still sizeable it has lost users, business and momentum – extremely dangerous territory for anyone in the fickle internet business. Today, News Corp's prime digital brand is perilously close to becoming an online also-ran – if it isn't already. And with Murdoch's stated intention to go against the internet consensus and put his web operations behind a paywall, MySpace is in an exposed position.

While changing your chief executive is a common business tactic, any company that does it twice in a year faces accusations of panic. But Jones and Hirschhorn insist that not only are things still under control, but that they have a plan to nurse MySpace back to prime health over the coming months.

Fresh partnerships

What does that entail? New designs will help make the site cleaner and more usable, though they plan to keep much of the idiosyncratic feel. Better technologies will make it easier to share what you are doing online with other people, while fresh partnerships will keep MySpace connected to the rest of the web. There will be more games and applications, and dropping extraneous products such as horoscopes will give more space to the site's traditional diet of movies, music and people. And in the long run, they say, more effort will go into understanding what people are looking for before they even start – it is this sense of "discovery" that they believe will help the site start growing again.

It's not just important for the company that these changes succeed: it is vital for MySpace's survival. The site once boasted user numbers of more than 120 million, and revenues (which have fallen short of targets for several years) are down to around $500m annually.

The mistakes of the past have clearly taken their toll. Jones talks of too much time spent "paying off technical debt". Hirschhorn speaks more plainly: when the site was in the spotlight, he suggests, it spent a great deal of effort coping with sudden growth – but then when things slowed down, it was too concerned with looking at its competitors and not enough with making progress.

"Success covers up a lot of operational issues, a lot of issues around creativity and product," he says. "And when the traffic started to plateau, there was a morale issue that centred around not being the stars any more." But how many second acts have there been for major online brands? Yahoo, which has tried reinventing itself many times, appears to be emitting the longest death rattle in history. Jones's former employer, AOL, is hoping for its own recovery, but only after a decade of limping along. Many suggest that AOL's boss, Tim Armstrong, is merely managing an inevitable decline.

Hirschhorn points to other companies that have come back from the brink – and has studied how they managed to do it. "Focus is everything," he says. "When I look at Apple, when I look at Nintendo – when I look at the great companies that have turned themselves around and re- defined themselves – it's because they have focused on a specific market, a specific set of things and partnered for the rest."

He draws on another example from his own experience: the TV channel VH1. "When I was working there it was very music-focused, very white rock-focused," he says. "Under Christina Norman, who runs Oprah's channel now, they reinvented themselves around pop culture. You can like it or not like it, but that's unique." These are fine examples, but none of them happened online, where tastes change rapidly and second-place brands are often crushed under the steamrolling desire for the next big thing.

And even if the site were to get back ahead of its rivals, it is not just its users that MySpace's bosses have to deal with. The site's fiercest critics think that its long-term chances of survival are slim because its ultimate boss, Murdoch, fails to understand what is taking place.

"Rupert, the guy who knows nothing about this whatsoever – is suddenly commandeering this whole thing," he said. "It's got everybody completely freaked out. Rupert is saying 'what's going on with MySpace, what's happening, why isn't this working?' – and it's impossible to explain to him that it's not working because it's over, because this is the way the technology business goes – once it's past, it's really past. There is almost no way to get that back."

In fact, MySpace's relationship with News Corp has always been tricky. After the initial acquisition, DeWolfe was careful not to cede too much control to his corporate parents – a policy that insiders say left the site unable to capitalise properly on the vast repository of TV, films and other content under News Corp's umbrella.

In recent months, however, the organisation has started to pull together a little more – and the duo reckon that could work in their favour."We know they have a really big, global voice and when we need to go out and bang the drum … then we will absolutely be able to go to News Corp and ask for that favour," says Jones.

"It's nothing that's going to happen tomorrow. We're doing a lot of tests, researching a lot of things and over the next few months we'll be releasing some fundamental changes. When we feel good about them we'll go out and beat that drum and bring the noise back to MySpace."

But even if it manages to use the corporation's resources to push itself back into the spotlight, these are undeniably crucial moments for MySpace. While most sites would kill for 100 million users, growth is the most important thing online. Once a brand is on the slide, it's nearly impossible to come back – and the internet's intensive care ward is stuffed with social websites such as Friendster and FriendsReunited.

Yet they go on, relishing the chance to perform an unparalleled act of internet resuscitation. "I love challenges, and it felt like a really big challenge," says Jones, recalling when he was first offered the job. "It was a big system, a tonne of audience, it had revenue pressures, it was getting a tonne of press coverage, there's a lot of people, it's international … it was an important thing not to write off and not to ignore."

For those at the top, MySpace may be too big to disregard – but the trick will be to get the rest of the world to take notice again.